"Tomorrow there was war". How February 24th changed us forever

On the evening of February 23, many people hugged their pillows in anticipation of startups, planners, and Zoom meetings. But a few hours later, they had to hug their child in a damp basement and digest what a "full-scale war" was. Later, the words "missile strike," "air defense," and "air raid" were typed to the Google search. This was followed by short text messages to relatives in Russia, if they had any, asking them to explain what it was. The response was silence or worse. "Be patient, we are liberating you from Nazism."

And they did liberate us. They burned Mariupol off the map, burned Kharkiv, shattered Mykolaiv, and are destroying Kherson now. They emptied our blooming cities of people and turned our villages into piles of construction waste. They forced children to dig graves for their parents in their yards with their fingers. They forced mothers to watch their children bleed to death in their arms. Women were forced to endure when the foreign cattle shoved their hands between their legs with rubber gloves, the only ones in a thousand who were humiliated in the filtration camps. Grandmothers who learned what Nazism was in childhood have now learned the bitterness of Rashism. So many of them went to their grandson's funeral when they should have been at their wedding.

All of us became one of those ceramic rooster, Shafa the cat, the man from Markhalivka, and the flag in the jar, which was waiting for our people to come to the Kharkiv region. We felt the pain of the Mariupol Drama Theater, which became a mass grave for hundreds of mothers with children. We lived every day with the defenders of Mariupol - the day was incomplete without short videos of Redis and Kalyna. We prayed with the man who read prayers over his son's body in Kharkiv. We could not hold back tears during the excavation of graves in Bucha. We could hardly breathe when we read how the son recognized his father from the graves in Izium by the bracelet on his hand. That man was a hero, and his 13-year-old son became an adult early. And how did Olenivka make your legs go weak? And how did the blood boil where the Tuvan occupier cut out the genitals of our fighter?

We recognized something animal when we learned to enjoy burned Russian soldiers. When it was not Arestovych who became a calming influence at night, but a new burnt skeleton of an occupier. When friends send each other puppies eating the occupier's meat instead of emojis. When the morning begins not with coffee, but with a occupier squirming from another fragmentation grenade shot.

It's a strange thing. This war actually began on February 20, 2014. Thousands of Donbas residents and Crimeans felt it long before date X. We really didn't believe them, didn't hear them, didn't understand them. And convinced ourselves that it would not affect me here. That apolitical people are not affected by Russia's aggression. That the unwillingness to recognize that the enemy is here and already at the gate is what kills. I feel very sorry for those people who have already fled the war once and are experiencing it for the second time. It is good if you have survived and your children are safe. But, no matter how harsh it sounds, we probably needed to go through it all, it's like a purification. To make everything manifest, to illuminate, as if under a powerful spotlight. When you are blinded for a short time, but then you clearly see the cracks, defects, and falsehoods. We have seen what we are worth, what those around us are worth, what the state is worth, what the people are worth, and we have sifted through the sieve of our friends. We learned the bitter price of "May barbecue", "Russians are people too", "we have no money for the army because we then won't have money for roads". That frivolous games with Russia always end in the same way - you play checkers, and it hits you on the skull with a sledgehammer. Russians always act in the same way-when Andrey Bogolyubsky burned Kyiv, when Menshikov massacred Baturyn, when they killed the Executed Renaissance in Kharkiv. And well, this understanding is coming to us now. To the sound of a generator, in the dim light of candles. To the sound of an air raid alarm. Through the remnants of the yellow kitchen, where there was happiness not so long ago.

Have you seen these incredible fantastic figures of NATO and the EU support  - 86% and 87%? And the support for a full-fledged democracy is a pure monolith - East, West, South and Center - and all over 90%. For this to finally happen, we had to go through genocide, deportation, and kidnapping of children.

I don't want to write about grief. There is plenty of it. Black headscarves have become dramatically younger - new women with this eerie accessory pass my bus stop almost every week. There are more and more obituaries - it's scary to say goodbye to those with whom you could have hours-long discussions about life. More and more of "I don't know." Questions like how to explain to a child why his parents died. Why did God allow this to happen? There is a growing understanding that there are things that need to be accepted. That Vuhledar is gone. That Soledar, Bakhmut, and Siverskodonetsk have become branches of hell on earth. But this is probably the only way to cure infantilism and the desire to be a toothless wimps. And so I'm even a little glad that on February 24, 2022, the noon hour came. You are no longer the urban madman who spent years and energy on volunteering, prisoners of war, and constantly cutting out both Portnov and condemning propagandists like Diana Panchenko. Because we too radical when we warned that Russia would come again, weren’t we?

We need to prepare for wars. Like millions of Ukrainians, I was anxiously awaiting February 24. I slept in thermal underwear. I have kept a backpack with my most valuable things in the hallway for a year. But when you are warned, when military exercises of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are held nearby, and our border guards in Chornobyl give middle fingers to Belarusian, the enemy will not attack Kyiv. It will also be left without the ability to provide clear explanations to its own people as to why all this was necessary.

I think we made one mistake last year - we tried to reach ordinary Russians for too long. Our stars recorded videos in tears with appeals to Russian mothers. We dragged them here and sometimes handed them a passport with blood on it. This had no effect. Rather, it resembles a search for coffee beans in a monkey's excrement. Because our enemy has had just one recipe all this time - to prepare weapons and destroy.

From the last "February" to this February, it seems that a hundred years have passed. But there is still enough work to be done. Because in addition to winning on the battlefield, we should finally cleanse our home of pro-Russian mold. We have to get rid of any attempts to protect Shufrych, Lyovochkin, Medvedchuk, Portnov and grow something new with the Arestovych avatar. Without this, it will be an endless running in circles - and there may not be a second chance with such titanic support from Biden, the West and German Leopards, that we hardly managed to get.

We will definitely pull through to victory. Because there are no tears or sentiments left. There is a cold calculation: either us or them. And finally, we must free ourselves from the shackles that have tied our hands and feet for 400 years.

Great honor and respect to everyone who is keeping our peace today. Eternal glory to those who died for Ukraine. We will continue to carry our blue and yellow flag. For Zaporozhian Sich, for the UPR, for the UPA, for the Heavenly Hundred, and for all those who have molded the Ukrainian.